I missed the FC marathon - perhaps wisely, I have far more important things to do just now - but I too get rather bored by the endless feting, hyping, and lauding of FC, L&L, and Sandy Denny.

I like a great deal both of rock music and of folk music, it's the bastardisation of the two together that rarely works for me. I doubt if I've liked more than 5-10% of all the folk-rock I've ever heard, and certainly can't think of a single folk-rock album, FC's included, of which I like as many as a third or half the tracks, let alone all of them. Perhaps, if you choose to call them folk-rock which I'm not sure that I would, The Oyster Band came pretty close with Lie Back And Think Of England, and perhaps slightly less so with Liberty Hall - certainly both albums have some great tracks, and it's a crying shame that they are not available as CDs.

I can't agree in any way that L&L is either seminal or important, irrelevant is more the word that springs to my mind.

Sandy Denny always sounds to me like a poor man's wannabe Joni Mitchell. Whereas I still treasure two albums of Joni's - "Ladies Of The Canyon" and "Blue" - I can't think of any album of Sandy's work that I would wish to own. Although "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" is rightly regarded as a brilliant track, it is only one track, whereas *every* track on those two Joni albums is at least very good, and many are brilliant, as are also quite a few from the album which came between them, "Clouds", which latter includes the originals of "Both Sides Now" and "The Fiddle And The Drum", which later June Tabor covered so well.

I just can't see it meself ... there was then and has been since so much better stuff out there ...

Perhaps if we could all remove the blinkered glasses for a moment, we could appreciate some of the other, arguably better music of the time that has somehow been largely forgotten.

The band Audience - variously described as art-rock, folk-rock, prog-rock - produced two eponymous albums, one so forgettable that it's only saved from utter wilderness by including "River Boat Queen", but the OTHER was absolutely brilliant, virtually every track a winner from start to finish! Fortunately, most of this latter LP ended up on the CD "Unchained", although I have often wondered why the single exception, the excellent "Elixir Of Youth", was dropped in favour of a mix of lesser tracks from other albums. They also produced an album called "Friend's Friend's Friend" which was, and maybe still is, available on CD, and which is almost as good.

Curved Air was another prog-rock band I listened to a great deal at the time. I think it's probably valid to compare Sonja Kristina with Sandy Denny, especially as she was at one time going to replace Sandy in The Strawbs, but she joined Curved Air instead. The band's first two albums, "Airconditioning" and "2nd Album" were particularly good, and although the rest of "Phantasmagoria" degenerated into wierdness, the first two tracks of it were among their best, and their fourth (I believe it was) album "Aircut" with a new line-up was also really good. Sonja, under her last name Linwood, is credited with contributions to most of their material. I particularly like tracks such as "Young Mother" and "Marie Antoinette".

But, although to my mind "Lie Back And Think Of England", "Liberty Hall", "Audience" (the one that opens with "Trombone Gulch"), "Friend's Friend's Friend", "Airconditioning", "2nd Album", and "Aircut" were all better than anything done by the folk-rock brigade, no-one talks of any of these albums in the same reverential tones.

There is no more artistic justice in this life than any other form of justice.